Noria Films is still the Production Company under which i will produce and edit, but there will be no update on this site in the near future. Thanks and im looking forward to see you on my new site!

greets from my luckily cool office! arne

We also did a great Motion Control Test – wich you also find on his site.

Looking forward to the premier of my little Movie. Meanwhile check our the CollabFeature Project. This wonderful international co-production prioject i joined last year makes great progress and you can watch a few making ofs and Vlogs about it over there.

The great thing about the recorder in iPhone is, that it adjusts the volume and you don´t have to worry about it. I stopped the recording in the end and it was all good.

Back at home i synced the phone with my mac over itunes and looked for the file – nothing there in the playlist with memos… and also on the phone – there was just a zero-seconds long recording … i was short to freak out. this hourlong recording just disappeared in the apple-nirvana. and my notes are a bunch of much to less letters on a little piece of paper… NOOOOOO….

but thankfully there is google and a fine solution. but it was not complete so i post here the right steps.

WHAT TO DO IF A LONG RECORDING ON YOUR IPHONE DISAPPEARS or GETS ZERO’D OUT

1. The reason why long recording get inaccessible is because they get safed as a .mov and not like the short ones as .m4a. This is a programming-bug or mistake or dumbassiness from apple – this is there since version 3.0 and its still not fixed in 4.1

2. The iphone and itunes are not capable to access these files, so we have to get into the system a little deeper to download the files to the mac/pc to play it and be happy again. for this you simply download the free app “iphone explorer” and install it. its for mac and pc and totaly free.

3. next connect your iphone and browse to “Root > User > Media > Recordings” and drag and drop all of your precious files. if you have a lot of recordings just search for the .mov files and copy them.

4. live happily ever after!

This is the Story of how a little Plug-In for After Effects (there are also versions for Premiere, FinalCut,Vegas and many more) helped to finish my last Project.

Download one of the best plugins here – Read the rest of the Review here:

The Short Film

One of my last Shortfilms i shot was called Infinite Memory Mafia. It was a short for a competition on www.hackermovies.com. It was quite a quick project from start to finish because it was all done in one week. From writing the book, finding the actors & locations, the shoot & the postproduction. Sadly we didn´t win – but it was a “online-voting”-competition. so the team with the most clickfriendly facebook friends win… thats ok. sad. but ok.

The good thing of this whole adventure on the other hand is, that there is one more nice little shortfilm in my portfolio.

But due to the really fast editing and the limitaion to 3 minutes (or so – i can´t remember) the film wasn´t as good as i hoped – and i knew that there is more potetial in it. So i started (after a few month of other works) with the, lovely sounding, Directors Cut! It was quite fun and the story got a really better drive this time.

So now once back to the production in the first place:

The original Shoot

My DoP was Alex Haspel. A really great cameraman from austria. i worked with him on a few projects already, and he knows what he is doing. but this time we had a camera, that he wasn´t used to. and we got it on the day of shooting – so there wasn´t a lot of time to get to know it in detail. it was a friends Canon 7D. And it was really great filming with it. The lowlight performance looked very good on the little screen, so we were glad to shoot with natural light and some practicals. we had a big bunch of lights in the truck outside – but not nearly the time to shoot with them. so we were all happy to see, that we can shoot with 3-4 simple standard 60W-100W lightbulbs. After wrapping and copying all the material to my laptop (this took hours) we went to sleep, with a happy and good feeling.

On the next day, on the editing suite of a friend (my old P4 wasn´t really capable of dealing with that kind of material ) i imported all of the filmed beauty into the avid. again hours of precious time went by (oh my god i thank avid for the 5.0 release-but this is another story, because that came a few month too late for this shoot)… just to realize that the avid rendered a really ugly noise pattern into my images. i was shocked, but as i looked at the original footage i was able to identify what happened. The lowlight performance wasn´t quite as good as it looked on the small monitor (one of a few reason why i will never ever shoot without a proper preview monitor again). There was a really ugly noise in the pictures – and the conversion to avid .mxf wasn´t the best cure for this. Sadly i dont have images from that, but here are a few pics of the original footage.

Back then it was not so bad. i cut in avid and finished it in after effects. this was good enough for the competition. and it ended up on the videoplatform in 360p – so the noise wasn´t the problem.

The Directors Cut

but now – the directors cut will hopefully see a few festivals – or at least one cinema screen, so the noise was really annoying. i tried my best with the tools after effects offers me. the build in noisereducer was ok, but it was unable to eliminate those stripes of noise in the blacks. then i just crushed the noise with the colourcorrection, but this gets really dark – and nearly all of the details were gone. so i was really down and let the project go to rest. … this is really hard, but true – i lost the drive to complete the movie, because i didn´t liked the look it got.

So it was there, stuck on one of those hdds in my shelf. and it waited. until a few days ago. i remembered the film and got a bad feeling, because all the people worked so hard on this film were waiting for the final product. the actors, who worked for me for free – all they wanted was good footage for their reel. one of them got all the footage from me, but the others just want the final for some snipplets. so i put the hdd back into my quickport and fired up after effects. (The directors cut was edited on a macbook pro 13″, in avid 5.0 and after effects cs5) With all the raw footage in there i searched the web for a good solution for my problem.

The Solution!

And voila! there it was: Neat Video Pro.

I downloaded the demo hoping for a good solution. the demovideos looked good and promising, but what will happen to these ugly stripes of noise? i tried it. the demo is quite restricted, because it just denoises a very small portion of your image. but it gives you a preview – and this was amazing. the edges and details stayed in the picture, but the noise was gone – after only pulling a rectangle around and the press two buttons.

Here is a Video with some Details of the Noise Reducing: Noise Video Sample … Sadly the Compression eats a lot up – but in the detail view you´ll see a difference!

I instantly bought the software. Its 99$ for the unlimited HD version (there is one for SD for 49.-) – so its a steal! i installed it and started the project. I applied the effect to a problematic shot, rectangle, analyze -> click, finetune -> click … and all the noise is gone. i stared at the screen with my mouth open. the images even looked sharper then before. So copy&paste the effect to all of the clips – that took about 10 minutes. and the film was sharp as a knife – no more noise. only in the really problematic shots there is a little rest, but not to mention. you can barley see the stripes anymore.

The effect is really simple to use. You search for a spot in your picture where you can draw a rectangle over a unified area ( a wall without structure, the floor, …) and then the little program starts its magic. Neat Video then analyses the noise pattern and BOOM – its gone. I don´t know what kind of badass programmers or voodoo have done it, but it works like a charm – so thumbs up!

Only downside of the plugin is that it adds a bit to the rendertime – but hey… it saved me a whole project … so this few minutes more (ok …it were hours) – who cares.

After this triumph i even pushed an old video from 2000 through the plugin. this project was shot on a canon xm1, edited on discreet edit (after transfer to Beta SP – only way to get in), post in discreet combustion, rendered with really bad codec, because uncompressed was to big for the system – and output to .avi and intel indeo 5… the most **** codec out there i guess. But after floating through time and space – AND the NEAT VIDEO PRO … it looked really really better. i still cant believe that.

So please have a look at the demo. its really for all kind of cameras. it doesn´t matter. you can even safe the noisepattern-settings for use on your next project with the same camera.

Have fun with that – so now im not afraid of the dark anymore – if you know what i mean

Here are some pics of the final Movie

Biggest obstacle are the missing videos. Until the Videos are all up on Vimeo…sadly the upload to the Main-Video sites is very slow at the moment – and i have to collect all my recent projects. This is also a bit of a work, because i recently changed systems from pc to mac and all of my data is still on the old system… and this system is completely disassembled for now.

So here are the links to the old design with all of my precious videos: Werbung & Film.

I´m very sorry for this inconvenience, but i hope you enjoy the new design!

This is the first post on the blog since i´m working on my redesign. After two years this is the first mayor change in the website. As i started to redesign in last time i changed the simple handcoded PHP-pages to a wordpress-system. This was my first contact with this amazing and free system. It works like a charme. No wonder, that the whole internet is based on WordPress at the moment.

One of the reasons to change to WordPress was the ease of use regarding the updates of the site. But my site is not the usual blog. It is a portfolio. Therefore i had to adjust the design a lot. Back to that time there weren´t these amounts of free and paid themes around to download and use. So it was coding all over again. But when you slowly dig into the code of wordpress it gets clear, that this system has potential, thats not nearly at his edge. So i made big changes in the codes and ended up with a quite nice website.

But as i checked my google analytics a few weeks ago, i realized, that the majority of users didn´t see the menubar as menubar – it was to clean in the design. So they ended up on my splashscreen – where i installed a temporary blog for my last project. And this splash was more of a scarecrow, because it was only text in ugly grey boxes. So i had a 98% bounce-rate (for all of you who don´t know wtf  a bounce-rate is (i didn´t ether): this gives you the percentage of site visitors, which just look at one single page on your site and then leave immediately). None of them looked at a single video from me – and that should have been the use of my portfolio in the beginning… so i had to change something.

Stuck in work on other projects (CollabFeature, Infinite Memory Mafia Directors Cut & a few paid projects) i still decided to change the overall and old look of my page to something fresh. A site where a high bouncerate doesn´t matter, because all the information is on the first

At the moment im still coding and adopting. The problem with the big “workarounds” i had in my last design is, that i can´t use it in my new design. So the great thing about wordpress, that you simply change the look in adding another template, doesn´t work out for me. Thats the pity of not being an expert on programming.

Another big change is, that i changed the language I use on the web to english. Especially now that i am working on this fantastic international project CollabFeature i saw the need of doing that. So i´m sorry for all of the typos and bad grammar – I´m still learning to blog in english

I also move all of my videos on the mainstream servers from YouTube and Vimeo. Until now i had all the files on my own server. This worked great, but the files were very small and compressed. So now, that Youtube and Vimeo offer this great HD quality i decided to go with the flow. In this process i was wondering why all the great video-people around prefer vimeo over youtube. Now that i´m testing the embedding i know why – youtube has no option to hide their ugly player controls. There are style-sheet workarounds, but that is silly to implement. So it means i will have to slowly change from youtube over to vimeo as my videos get converted on their horrible slow server – even for paid vimeo pro users is this a pain, as my college Nino Leitner pointed out in a meeting a few days ago.

Next i will talk about the redesign-process. But more on that later.

For now – please enjoy the new design and keep

Hierfür wurde eine neue Version von Avid MediaComposer angeschafft, die eine besonders gute Verarbeitung von Canon 55D Material verspricht. Das Importieren der .mov Files funktioniert auch einwandfrei und ein sofortiges schneiden wäre möglich. Da aber leider die Performance beim Schneiden von h264 Material noch sehr schlecht ( Version 1.0 des AMA-Plugins ) ist, muss doch erst noch in ein Avid-Internes Format transcodiert werden. Dieser Prozess dauert. 64 von 306 Clips sind jetzt importiert. So long… Der Schnitt beginnt also doch erst morgen.

“Eine Nudel kommt selten alleine” ist unter den wenigen Auserwählten Filmen und wird sogar an beiden Festivaltagen gezeigt.

Dank Thomas Weilguny und Juliana Neuhuber, David Auner und Fritz von Film4Profit, die Equipment und Requisiten zur Verfügung gestellt haben und Anna Nostitz, die meterweise Stoffe aus ihrem Lager gesponsort hat konnten Nino und Ich ein aufregendes Bühenbild zaubern. Die Dreharbeiten in dem feuchten Kellerräumen verlangen den Schauspielern und der Crew einiges ab, und auch das Wissen, dass draußen im freien ein herrlicher Sommertag ist, hat allen viel disziplin abverlangt. Doch die Dreharbeiten gingen gut voran und das Catering von Nicola Stephanou hat uns gut gestärkt.

Nach dem Abbau der Studioszene ist das Team etwas unter Zeitdruck in der Wohnung angekommen wo noch die Aufnahmen der Trailer-Duschszene folgten. Spät aber doch kann der erste Tag mit Erfolg abgeschlossen werden. Die Bilder von Nino Leitner sind atemberaubend und ich freue mich schon sehr auf den 2. Tag.